Arie Van De Graaf is a cartoonist who writes and draws "Mission Daze." The comic strip has been affiliated with deseretnews.com for two years, but now the print edition will include "Mission Daze" in a weekly comic strip.

The time between getting a mission call and entering the Missionary Training Center left Arie Van De Graaff with a lot of time on his hands.

So he started drawing cartoons.

“I had months of time where I wasn’t in school waiting to go on my mission, so I started drawing and creating this story," Van De Graaff said.

That story would be heavily influenced by his mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and it lives on in a series called "Mission Daze." Selected cartoons from Van De Graaff's series have been published online at deseretnews.com for the past two years and, beginning Thursday, will appear weekly in the print edition of Mormon Times on page C2.

Van De Graaff, who lives in Draper with his wife and four children, works full time at the Utah Association of Counties, where he represents county interests in the Legislature. His job, he says, is much more serious than his part-time hobby, but getting to this point with cartooning has taken a lot of hard work and has included some setbacks.

Van De Graaff decided to leave his art supplies at home when he left for the MTC. Two days later, and with the margins of his missionary books full of cartoon doodles, he sent a letter home requesting his family to send him the supplies.

From 1993 to 1995, he served in Slovenia, a small country bordering Italy, Austria, Hungary and Croatia. And every week in his letters, Van De Graaff included a drawn joke or gag for his family back in Orem.

The first drawings of "Mission Daze" were on the outside of the envelope and became popular with both his family and other Mormon missionaries. Later, he included the drawings on the inside of the envelope, which allowed him to provide greater detail to the gags because he no longer had to work around addresses and stamps.

“Every week, without fail, I included a strip with my letter to my family,” Van De Graaff says on his website. “Over the two years I was in Slovenia, I sent home nearly 100 gags — a couple of which were actually funny.”

And when he wasn’t proselytizing and drawing, Van De Graaff was observing the people and culture of Slovenia, which influenced "Mission Daze."

“The idea was this is one missionary, and it starts off when he receives his call and goes all the way through his homecoming," he said. "The country that I sent this missionary to is based off of Slovenia, though (in the strip) I call it Laputania. I also took what I wanted and created my own kind of culture. Then I came home and I thought, ‘This is pretty good. I wonder if I could carry it out.’ ”

Van De Graaff worked hard between the summer of returning home from his mission and the fall semester of Brigham Young University to turn the comic strip into something that could be published. After he had 50 strips ready to go, he approached editors about putting the strip in their newspapers. He quickly found that there wasn't a market for a cartoon series about an LDS missionary.

After continued rejection from editors, Van De Graaff decided to give up on the cartoon and focus on school. He graduated from BYU with a master's degree in public administration and began his career in the public sector. But he continued to draw.

Van De Graaff had many one-strip cartoons published in the New Era and children’s puzzles published in The Friend, both magazines published by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Then, the motivation to finish the missionary comic strip returned.

“I had more time on my hands and my little brother was going out on his mission," he said. "I thought this would be fun for him — it would give him some help — so I started doing this with the idea of sending (it) to my brother as a missionary."

Popular Comments

The Deseret News. The most peculiar newspaper in America. The only newspaper
that publishes through a prism of the religious culture of one particular
regional religious group. To understand the humor of Mission Daze, you have to
be Mormon or have
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7:20 a.m. July 10, 2014

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Beowulf

Portland, OR

The Deseret News survives as a viable newspaper in this day and age of declining
newspaper readership PRECISELY because it caters to its core readership, that of
LDS persons. (This is why I read it online, despite living a 1000 miles away.)
If you
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